Succession Planning and Talent Management

Succession planning and talent management is about how you identify and develop the leaders of tomorrow. For teaching schools this is about how you systematically identify leadership talent within and across alliances, and the strategies that you then employ to move this talent onwards.

The work of teaching schools in this respect is set against a backdrop of national challenge within the system. One in four headteachers are eligible to retire in the next four years, and the school system faces a succession challenge to secure enough high quality headteachers to replace them. There remains particular difficulty in recruiting headteachers to some school types, most notably; primary, small rural, special and faith schools.

Over the next few years, teaching school alliances will have an increasingly important strategic role in succession planning by systematically managing the talent in their alliances to bring through the next generation of headteachers for all schools. Teaching school alliances will take responsibility for:

securing local leadership supply data in order to strategically plan for how they will develop leaders to meet their future local needs

developing future headteachers to help meet the most pressing national needs of primary, small rural, special, challenging urban/coastal and faith schools

taking positive action to help diversify senior leadership and achieve representation of women and those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds

putting in place systematic processes across teaching school alliances to identify leadership talent in areas of need

putting in place systematic talent management that develops this leadership talent within and across their schools (through a range of authentic leadership placements and experiences)

building strategic governance and partnerships across teaching school alliances in order to make strategic decisions about developing and placing their collective talent